Most entries on the theory shelves assume that the reader knows roughly what is meant by modern and postmodern. This primer is for readers who would like that assumption made good. It is deliberately short. Each term names a mood as much as a doctrine, and each is easier to recognize than to define, so the definitions below should be treated as scaffolding to be taken down once the building stands.
A caution first. These labels describe tendencies in the art and thought of the industrial West. They overlap, their dates are disputed, and no artist ever sat down intending to be an example of one.
Modernism in one paragraph
Modernism is the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaped by the industrial city and, decisively, by mechanized war. Its starting point is the experience that inherited forms, in religion, art and social life, had stopped working. Its response was to break those forms and make new ones: the fragmented poem, the abstract canvas, the novel that follows a mind rather than a plot. Modernism is frequently bleak, but it is not skeptical all the way down. It still believes that there is a truth to be found beneath the broken surface, and that a sufficiently radical art or science might reach it. Its characteristic emotion is anxiety, and its characteristic figure is the isolated individual.
Postmodernism in one paragraph
Postmodernism, usually dated from the middle of the twentieth century, begins where that last belief gives out. It doubts that there is one truth beneath the surface, or one story that explains history, or one standpoint from which the whole can be judged. In place of depth it offers surface; in place of originality, quotation and collage; in place of the tragic tone, play and irony. High and popular culture are mixed without apology. Where the modernist mourned the loss of meaning, the postmodernist is inclined to ask who said there was supposed to be one. Its characteristic emotion is a cool detachment, and its characteristic figure is not the lonely individual but the self assembled from borrowed parts.
Five working ideas
Postmodern theory is a loose family of arguments rather than a system. Five ideas do most of the work.
Incredulity toward grand narratives. The large stories by which modern societies justified themselves, such as the steady march of progress or the liberation of humanity through knowledge, are no longer believed. What remains are many small, local stories, none of which can claim to speak for all.
Meaning is made in the reading. A text does not carry a single meaning placed there by its author and waiting to be extracted. Meaning arises in the encounter between the text and a reader who brings a language, a history and a set of expectations. This shifts authority from the writer's intention to the act of interpretation.
Simulation. Images and models no longer simply represent reality; they increasingly precede and replace it. This idea has its own entry, The Desert of the Copy.
Pastiche. Postmodern art imitates past styles without the satirical purpose of parody. It quotes because everything has been done, and the available move is to rearrange.
The constructed self. Identity is not an inner essence that a person discovers. It is put together from roles, languages and images supplied by a culture, and could have been put together otherwise.
Metamodernism in one paragraph
Metamodernism is a name proposed for the sensibility that followed, noticeable from roughly the turn of the twenty-first century. It accepts the postmodern critique and declines to stop there. Its defining movement is oscillation: between irony and sincerity, doubt and hope, knowingness and commitment. The prefix is taken to mean between and beyond as well as after. A metamodern work may be openly earnest while acknowledging that earnestness is naive, and it treats that tension as a resource rather than a contradiction. Its characteristic emotion is a guarded hopefulness. The fuller account is in After Irony.
The three at a glance
- Attitude to truth
- Modernism: hidden, but there to be found. Postmodernism: plural, local and made. Metamodernism: uncertain, and pursued anyway.
- Typical form
- Modernism: the fragment and the experiment. Postmodernism: the collage and the quotation. Metamodernism: the sincere work that knows it is a work.
- Tone
- Modernism: anxious and serious. Postmodernism: detached and playful. Metamodernism: earnest and self-aware in alternation.
- Figure
- Modernism: the alienated individual. Postmodernism: the assembled self. Metamodernism: the person trying to mean it.
- Relation to the past
- Modernism: break with it. Postmodernism: quote it. Metamodernism: return to it with open eyes.
Common misreadings
"Postmodernism says nothing is true." It says that claims to truth are made from somewhere, by someone, in a language, and that this is worth knowing about them. That is a claim about how knowledge is produced. It does not follow that every statement is as good as every other, and most postmodern writers were at pains to deny it.
"Postmodernism is a political program." The body of work is too various to have one. It has been attacked from every direction, as corrosive of tradition by some and as a distraction from material struggle by others.
"Postmodernism caused the present confusion." Theories are more often thermometers than furnaces. The fragmentation of shared stories has many causes, among them the media environment, the decline of institutions and the experience described in The Slow Apocalypse. The theory described these changes; it did not bring them about.
"Metamodernism means the return of sincerity." It means the return of sincerity as one pole of a swing. The irony does not go away.
Where to read next
- For the argument about images and copies, The Desert of the Copy.
- For what the postmodern period did to the feeling of awe, The Postmodern Sublime.
- For the darker cousin of these ideas, What Transgression Was For.
- For the same sensibility at work in religion, Chaos Magic and the Do-It-Yourself Occult.
- For definitions of individual terms, the glossary.